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34'7 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



\ 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

HEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAt 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO.. Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OP CANADA. Lm. 

TORONTO 




FIRST CLOISTER, FLORENCE SAN MARCO 



A 
Florentine Revery 



BY 
H. H. Powers 

Preaident of The Bureau of University Travel 



tftew Pork 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1922 

All rights reserved 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



n^A 



-VP^ 



^(9 



Copyright, 1932, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyi)ed. Published December, 1932. 



FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY 
NEW YORK 



DEC 20 '22 av 



« I 



The following pages lay no claim to the character 
of exact history. The aim has been to give pictorial 
expression to certain significant phases and promi- 
nent personalities in the life of a famous city. The 
dates here asstimed are more or less arbitrary and 
the sequence of events somewhat simplified. In the 
interest of pictorial completeness conjecture has 
been freely admitted to fill the inevitable void of 
the historic record. All this, it is hoped, is consistent 
with that essential truth which, if respected, may 
legitimately be clothed in such historic accidents^as 
we will. 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 

From the visitor's seat on the ramparts of old 
Fiesole the traveler looks out upon one of the most 
suggestive scenes in Italy. Around him are the 
relics of the much metamorphosed ancient Etruscan 
city. Here are still the huge stones that were moss 
grown when the she wolf was suckling Romulus. 
The open square a few yards below, down the steep 
path, is the ancient forum or market, adjoined by 
the Roman theatre, the mediaevel cathedral, and 
the very modem statues of Victor Emanuel and 
Garibaldi. For Fiesole covers well nigh the whole 
span of history, and no age of stirring achievement 
has failed to leave its memorial. 

But it is not these nearer surroundings that first 
challenge attention. Beyond the battlement the 
eye ranges over one of the most remarkable views 
in Europe. It is not merely that the view is enchant- 
ing, though this is indubitable. The view is unique 
in all Italy if not in all Europe. A broad, saucer 
shaped depression, perhaps forty miles in diameter, 
and bounded by a remarkably regular rim of hills 
extends before us, the whole clothed in richest ver- 
dure and enlivened by flashes from the gleaming 

1 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



river. In the center, huddled close, lies Florence, 
its domes and towers familiar even to the stranger. 
From a dozen hilltops rise the crenellated towers of 
ancient castles or petty baronial seats. And scat- 
tered far and wide from the city's walls out to the 
very saucer's rim gleam the white walls of Tuscan 
villas, their sentinel cypresses darkly outlined against 
the grey green of the olive clad hills. 

Our first impression is one of perfect harmony. 
This is Italy, the Italy of our dreams. All is as it 
should be; no part that could be spared; none that 
would not miss the rest. The impression is not one 
to be needlessly disturbed. The mood of simple 
enjojrment may well be indulged indefinitely. For 
this fusion of old and new, this harmonizing of 
implacable systems, this supreme s>Tithesis is the 
most noteworthy of aU facts here suggested. 

But sooner or later this sense of harmonious imity 
gives place to more detailed and puzzling impressions. 
This is Italy, we were saying, but now that we 
reflect, it is profoundly unlike the Italy that we have 
traversed from Naples or Brindisi up to the crest 
of the Apennines. There lies Florence, accessible, 
peaceful, and convenient, in the center of the beau- 
tifiil valley of which it is at once the creation and 
the mistress. What more natural? But recalling 
what we have seen, what other city is so situated? 
Where were the cities that we passed on our journey 
hither? There is Cassino which looks down upon 
us as from an eagle's nest. There are Alatri and 

2 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



Anagni and Palestrina, ancient rivals of Rome, all 
perched upon hilltops miles from the railway stations 
that now bear their names. There is Orvieto upon 
her isolated table rock that falls sheer away on 
every side, a city approached by miles of toilsomely 
winding road, or more conveniently by the modem 
funicular railway. There is Chiusi, the ancient Clu- 
sium, where the mighty Lars Porsena held sway, a 
city so high and far away that the hurried traveler 
misses it altogether and takes the cluster of buildings 
around the railway station for the home of the 
redoubtable chieftain. There are Cortona and Siena, 
and Perugia, and Assisi, and Spello, and Spoleto, and 
Temi, — the list is endless. These cities do not nestle 
conveniently in the valleys, easy of access and com- 
fortable. They crown the distant hilltops, close 
shut within cyclopean walls, infinitely picturesque, 
but to the last degree inconvenient, suspicious and 
unneighborly. Even Rome, situated in the midst 
of her broad campagna and unprotected by her 
distant circle of mountains, is but a seeming ^excep- 
tion. Her low situation and comparatively easy 
modem grades quite conceal her ancient topography. 
When the primitive folk who were attracted here 
by the traffic of the Tiber located their scattered 
settlement on the seven hills, these spurs and frag- 
ments of the ancient plateau were separated by 
well nigh impassable chasms which made them almost 
as impregnable as Orvieto, though less resistant to 
later levelling. Decidedly the typical Italian city is 

3 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



a hill city, inconvienient, inaccessible, and afraid. 

And here below lies Florence in the midst of her 
smiling valley, her level plain but a few yards 
above the neighboring sea, and not a hill within her 
ancient limits the height of a man's statue. Nature 
offers her not the slightest protection. Even the 
shallow Amo nms straight past and refuses to 
encircle the town. Florence was located with no 
thought of danger or provision for defense. 

And now that we reflect, we are reminded that 
the place where we are sitting upon the stone bench 
offers precisely the advantages which the Italians 
seem everywhere else to have chosen. A steep hill 
falHng away abruptly on every side, but with suffi- 
cient building space for a crowded ancient city, a 
higher portion for the indispensable citadel, and a 
depression or saddle for the necessary market place, 
it needed but moderate fortifications of the ancient 
type to render it impregnable. 

It was an ideal site for a city that should dominate 
the fair plain below. Nay, the site was chosen and 
the city that was built there did dominate the plain 
for centuries before the first tower rose on the banks 
of the Amo. It is Fiesole that is the true Italian 
city, the coimterpart of a hundred others that from 
their hilltops have watched the growth and the crum- 
bling of empires for the last three thousand years. 
It is Florence that is the enigma, a city that had 
scarce its like in the whole peninsula until these 
modem times. 

4 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



But this is not the only thing in the scene before 
us that calls for explanation. Where else in Italy 
do we see a broad expanse of valley dotted with 
villas and country seats as we do here? It is all 
so perfectly as it should be that we do not at first feel 
moved to question. But the question once raised, 
we recall that other valleys are not like this. From 
the walls of Perugia or Siena we look across to other 
hilltop cities, but isolated homes are few in the 
plain below. Farther south they vanish altogether, 
or if fotind at all they are of most recent origin. 
What traveler in Italy has not heard the query: 
"Where do the people live who till these fields and 
tend these vines?" And the answer is always that 
they live up in the walled towns on the distant hill- 
tops, daily toiling up and down to their work in the 
distant fields and vineyards. But here it is not so. 
The husbandman lives among his vines and the 
proprietor upon his estate, and has lived there for 
many generations. It is well, but why here and 
not elsewhere? 

Our panorama from high perched Fiesole is there- 
fore not merely beautiful and picturesque. It is 
plainly full of meaning to those who reflect upon its 
tmique features. The Etruscan walls, the city on 
the Amo, the towering castles, and the scattered 
villas have each their own significance and stand as 
the expressive symbols of different epochs of civili- 
zation. In their day they have been bitter rivals 
and have drenched the land in blood for the trivimph 

5 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



or the maintenance of that which they represent. 
This fair Tuscan plain is a paHmpsest, a parchment 
on which age after age has written its story, each 
effacing or obscuring that which was before. Can 
we decipher the half-obHterated text? Let us begin 
with the earliest record. 



.6j 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



The spell is woven and the later records are 
effaced. The city by the Amo, the castles on the 
hilltops, the villas with their cypresses and their 
vines have faded. The olive has but begun its 
progress up the long slopes which are still dark with 
the native oak and give to primitive husbandry but 
a limited domain. Only the mountains are here and 
the broad plain and the snatches of stinlit river. 

But Fiesole is here already, firmly seated upon 
her convenient hilltop, the same and yet different. 
No cathedral or bell tower rises behind the market 
place. Even the theatre is not yet, and in the place 
of the familiar monastery with its black gowned 
friars rises an imposing citadel in whose walls we 
recognize the cotmterpart of the great stones already 
familiar. Lower walls surround the city, and their 
ponderous metal covered gates groan on huge pivots 
as they swing to and fro at rise and set of sun, or 
more hastily when danger threatens, a possibility 
evidently contemplated by the sentinels who pace 
the ramparts. Through the gateway passes the 
husbandman down the rugged path to his distant 
fields, meeting the merchant with the wares of 
distant Hellas or the laden asses bringing home the 

7 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



produce of the fields. Cattle and sheep and goats 
add to the motley procession. 

There are not wanting signs of opulence and good 
taste inside the guarded walls. Houses may be 
poor and streets narrow and mean, but there is 
beauty and cunning in their golden jewels and the 
well built walls and imposing gateways testify to 
taste as well as to power and pride. The dead, too, 
are provided with spacious tombs where sculptured 
angels with inverted torch guard their funeral urns, 
and banquets depicted upon the walls invite their 
spirits to refreshment. Nor are there wanting those 
mysterious symbols of the written word which alone 
can rescue men's virtues and deeds from oblivion. 
For the Etruscan is no barbarian, but the proud peer 
of those who are just now building their Parthenon 
and celebrating their triumph over the devouring 
east. The cunning wares of the Greek workshop 
have found in him not only their best customer but 
their cleverest imitator, the skill 'of the Etruscan 
craftsmen baffling the very elect. His wise men, 
too, are skilled in all the wisdom of the Eg^^ptians 
and Egyptian wares are among his possessions. I 

But above all the Etruscan stands for mastery 
and the strong right arm. -His strongholds are not 
the work of weaklings. They bear the stamp, not 
of puny elegance, but of energy and purpose. He 
has reached his own solution of the great hvrnian 
problem, a solution which he regards with com- 
placency, perhaps with a sense of finality. Man was 

8 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



a hunted animal exposed to ever recurring dangers 
and constant terrors. He has built him cities of 
refuge where he may sleep in peace and to which 
he may run to cover from the marauder. The 
no-man's-land between necessarily retains some- 
thing of its old time perils. What reasonable man 
would ask that the whole countryside be pacified? 
What would become of the virtues of hardihood and 
cunning if everything were safe? But if men must 
face these dangers manfully as behooves those who 
engage in the dangerous business of living, it is 
reassuring to know that the sentinel is watching 
from his tower and that if danger nears, the city 
will afford him succor or refuge according to his 
need. 

It is a spotty civilization. The arts and the 
graces, flowers of peace, are found only under hot- 
house shelter, biding the time when a more genial 
sun will permit them to cover the land and fill the 
valley with their perfume. 



9 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



II 

Half a millennitun has passed and again we stand 
on the walls of Fiesole. There is change, yet less of 
change, it would seem, than might be expected from 
these momentous centuries. The citadel, the walls, 
the market, all are there and little modified, yet in 
disrepair and seemingly less regarded. There is no 
lookout in the watch tower and the massive gateway 
serves only the purposes of the publican. The 
market is still frequented, but more by idlers than 
by buyers and traffic in the varied wares is local and 
petty. The city would seem to have prospered, for 
it boasts a new theatre and other public buildings, 
and new homes such as even an Etruscan lord never 
knew. And amazing to relate, these are built o itside 
the walls, some of them far down the slope and 
quite beyond the reach of the city's protection. 

Perhaps the most noteworthy change is in the 
citizens themselves when once we become conscious 
of it. They are not afraid, yet they lack the old-time 
resoluteness and self confidence. Though well-to-do, 
they give little sign of enterprise or initiative, like 
men accustomed to follow rather than to lead, and 
prosperous by inheritance rather than by achieve- 
ment. Their pride is in things ancestral and their 

iO 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



cherished distinctions are based on tradition. Fie- 
sole is of yesterday. We must look elsewhere for 
the men of today. 

Now that we turn our gaze toward the valley, we 
become gradually conscious of other changes. Till- 
age has changed its character and become more 
general. Long white lines cross the plain which we 
discover to be roads definitely located and con- 
structed with paved surface and crossing the streams 
by bridges instead of by fords. And most note- 
worthy of all, there is a new city built in the most 
incredible of places, on the flat land by the river. 
It is to this that we turn our attention. 

It is not a large city — you can walk through it 
from wall to wall in seven or eight ninutes — for it is 
of recent origin and it has not grown by conquest or 
spoliation. But it is enterprising and prosperous as 
its name, Florentia, the flourishing, aptly, if acci- 
dentally, implies. No wonder when we see the ease 
with which it is approached along the paved and 
level highways. It is not strange that the laden 
asses have forsaken the rugged path up to grim Fie- 
sole and now drop their packs at the river market 
instead. It does not take us long to discover that 
energy and thrift have forsaken sleepy Fiesole and 
migrated to the bustling town on the banks of the 
Arno. The Fiesolans are uneasily conscious that 
the change is to their disadvantage and that the 
candlestick has been removed from its place. They 
note the wealth of the upstart rival, compare its 

11 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



new theater with their own, and shake their heads 
with envious disapproval at its arena, and gladia- 
torial shows. Florentia is parvenu. It has no 
traditions, no quality. Its population, of scattered 
and tmknown origin, has no lineage, no family. It 
is with due emphasis upon these heirloom values 
that these heirs of the ages watch the progress of 
the supplanter, for men are more disposed to boast 
of their possessions than to confess their losses. 

All this and more is evident on acquaintance, but 
it does not solve our riddle. How comes it that 
there is a supplanted and a supplanter? How is it 
that there is a city on the river bank where of old 
it was axiomatic that no city could exist? Whence 
comes that new confidence that emboldens men to 
build their villas outside the walls and even at a 
distance from their protection ? Whence these roads 
and this security unknown before? 

The answer to these questions is to be found in a 
larger fact of which we are early and increasingly 
conscious. There is a big overshadowing something 
which is in all men's thoughts and which enters into 
all their calculations. Neither Fiesole nor the new 
Florentia are of a character to account for this new 
confidence, this new seciuity, this new opulence. It 
is quickly apparent that they are but tiny meshes 
in a vast net which some mighty hand has flung 
over a turbulent world. These roads that the eye 
follows out toward the valley's rim lead over and 
beyond, to something else, to something bigger. 

12 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



They bring to Florentia and to Fiesole alike not 
merely produce and cunning craftsmanship, but 
authority and guidance. Fiesole may look to Flo- 
rentia but Fiesole and Florentia alike look to Rome. 

This is the supreme change which has been 
wrought in these five hundred years. Fiesole of old 
was all things to herself and to the little territory 
that sought shelter in the shadow of her walls. 
With Clusitim and Cortona and the rest she had 
something of an understanding and there were rudi- 
mentary arrangements for cooperation in certain 
extreme emergencies, but these were sternly held in 
check, not to say vitiated, by a never failing jealousy. 
The ordering of daily life was local and its vision 
introspective. Neighborly relations were negative 
and based on the let-alone ideal. Hence the huddling 
in fortress towns, the imperfect tillage of surround- 
ing fields and the scant protection of property and 
life by intermittent foray and reprisal. It was a 
system that developed hardihood and self-reliance, 
virtues according to its needs, as every system does, 
virtues far less in evidence in the later reposeful 
Fiesole or bustling Florentia. Man kept his hand 
on the sword hilt, and there was the look of a hunted 
thing on the face of civilization. 

Rome has changed all that. Gradually as her 
dominion has become assured, she has not only 
subdued the strong places to her will, but she has 
evolved that far reaching organization which has 
brought the no-man's-land under orderly adminis- 

13 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



tration. It is not so much her greater physical 
power as it is the infinitely more effective instru- 
ments through which that power is exercised. Her 
roads traverse the moiintains, her bridges span the 
rivers, and her galleys cross the seas. Her police 
patrols, her courts, her laws and her administrative 
tradition have made banditry unprofitable and piracy 
unsafe. 

It is a new thing under the sun, this policing of a 
whole land and the establishment of security from 
sea to sea. If the world ever saw its like before the 
memory of it has passed away. Guided by no 
tradition, inspired by no precedent, Rome has con- 
ceived and executed the mighty task. We can 
hardly exaggerate the importance of the achieve- 
ment or honor too highly the people who have thus 
tamed our world. The hill cities have become 
unnecessary now and their walls more of a hindrance 
than a help. Rome has herself signalized the advent 
of a happier time by tearing down the walls that 
had once been her reliance, judging them to be no 
longer a protection, but a hindrance to her growth. 
Her splendid expansion across the broad campagna 
with its far flung line of gardens and villas is a 
challenge to the dwellers in walled cities to avail 
themselves of that freedom wherewith Rome has 
made them free. Were it not for that inertia which 
so far exceeds all other factors in determining the 
ways of men, the hill cities, already obsolete, would 
be forsaken. But that conservatism which at once 

14 



^A FLORENTINE REVERY 



preserves otir gains and impedes our progress, yields 
but slowly to the logic of events, and Florentia is a 
pioneer in inaugurating the new era. The outcome, 
however, seems not doubtful. If the Pax Romana 
endures, the hill towns will be given over to the 
owls and bats. 



15 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



III 

But no. The hill towns endure, have endured for 
a thousand years since last we visited them in the 
spirit. Little changed they seem in the midst of 
a world that has undergone a melancholy transforma- 
tion. Rome has walls again and her children huddle 
in palaces now become tenements, and her temples 
are in ruins. The campagna is a wilderness where 
buffaloes graze. Where once were gardens and 
palaces are shapeless heaps. The roads are gullied 
and overgrown with bush. No legions march to 
guard the far frontier where Norman William and 
Saxon Harold struggle for the abandoned domain. 
For Rome has passed and the Pax Romana is a 
memory. 

How fares it with Val d'Amo and the cities of 
hill and plain? A glance suffices to show that they 
have not been exempt from the world's tribulation. 
Fiesole has found new reason for existence, but an 
existence without prosperity or power. A scanty 
population now dwells meanly within her patched 
up walls, seeking there safety from the prevailing 
violence. The villas without the walls are in ruins 
or replaced by rude castles. The theater is aban- 
doned or devoted to ignoble uses. The wares in the 
market are of the simplest and garish gewgaws 

16 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



have displaced the signs of culture and taste. Only 
the temples are new, for Fiesole has placed her trust 
in other gods before whose symbols she bows with 
servile reliance on their talismanic power. If she 
still looks to Rome, it is from habit rather than with 
any hope of succor or guidance. Fiesole is thrown 
upon herself again, but not with her old time pride 
or power. She is no longer mistress of the broad 
valley which is now parceled out into petty fiefs 
ruled from a dozen different hilltops, each crovsmed 
by its castle or fortress house. Fiesole in her fallen 
estate is but one of the ntmiber, larger but hardly 
more powerful. Tillage is backward and the yield 
is meager. Worse still, there is lawlessness, and the 
sower does not always reap where he sowed. Life 
has become incredibly simple and unwillingly self- 
sufficing. A pallet of straw or rushes serves as the 
bed even of the lord of the manor. The coarse fare 
of his table is such as the neighboring fields supply. 
The sheep that graze in the neighborhood fiunish 
the wool which is carded and spun and woven by the 
household for the household's use. Every hamlet 
has its cobbler, its carpenter, its mason, whose 
implements are fashioned by the local smith in the 
intervals between his tasks as armourer and farrier. 
There is the priest, of course, the keeper of the 
talismans and the weaver of incantations, and the 
friar, his ubiquitous associate, the two performing 
as may be with images and rites the functions of 
schoolmaster and physician. But of that manifold 

17 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



and far reaching life that had grown up under the 
Pax Romana, little remains. The broken statues 
and battered temples that remain as its witnesses 
are now woven about with folk tales and given out 
as the gift of wonder worker and magician. 

Such communities offer scant encouragement to 
the merchant and purveyor of luxuries. The pack 
animals are few that make their way over the 
neglected roads, their owners evading or buying 
off the bandits that infest the way and satisfying the 
scarcely less rapacious gentry whose protection they 
are compelled to seek. Warily the traveler makes his 
way from castle to castle claiming the hospitality 
which can not be refused and not forgetting the gift 
which is its inevitable coimterpart. Long standing 
custom has hardened into law. The gift has become 
a tax and the castle a toll gate. Great Rome has 
crumbled and these petty depotisms are the crumbs. 

But though gone, Rome is not forgotten. The 
peace which she established was so beneficent, the 
world embracing mechanism of her administration 
was so wonderful, and her power was so imposing 
that the centuries during which these things endured 
have made of Rome an imperishable tradition. 
Gone but assuredly not perished. Somewhere that 
power, that world embracing authority, must still 
exist. Like Arthur of the Table Round, Rome must 
come again and resume her sway. Such is the in- 
stinct rather than the reasoned faith of these simple 
folk of the Middle Age. No rebels against authority, 

18 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



they, but seekers, prone to accept its token, like 
those who of old followed the star. 

And Rome has come again, not, as of old, seated 
upon her seven hills, nor yet quite clothed with her 
old majesty, but strong handed and all subduing, 
out of the north, bearing the promise of order again 
and peace with its old time blessings. The promise 
has had scant fulfillment, and the authority estab- 
lished by this Rome of the north has brought but 
imperfect order and intermittent peace. But such 
authority as there is is largely of her creation. It 
is this reincarnated Rome that placed these lordlings 
in the castles and clothed them with their petty au- 
thority. As appointees of a foreigner they were 
originally strangers to Italy, largely German, and 
though they have forgotten their German speech 
and become assimilated into that people who have 
absorbed so many of their race before, they have 
never lost the proud distinction of their imperial 
appointment. They are Rome, the living embodi- 
ment of that authority that can never die and to 
which men look for peace and happiness. These 
men have neither the wealth of Rome nor her power 
nor her genius, but they have her tradition. They 
live meanly and by doubtful expedients. Their 
authority extends but a few furlongs from their 
doors. But nothing can obliterate the fact that they 
have the emperor's warrant, that they wear the 
livery of Rome. 

But what of Florentia, that bud of promise that 

19 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



epitomized the Pax Romana ? We have briefly over- 
looked the hopeful little town in our broader survey. 
It is not strange. Florentia is there, but she is not 
flourishing. The changes we have noted have borne 
hard on a town built for commerce rather than for 
defence. The return of lawlessness has destroyed 
her commerce, and despite her well built walls, 
there is little but inertia to account for her continued 
existence. In common with all other communities, 
she has to accept the rudimentary culture of a primi- 
tive agricultural community for the age knows no 
other, save in the secluded life of the cloister where 
a scant survival of art and letters is hibernating in 
hope of a coming summer. We know not by what 
stages the flourishing commercial city has been 
transformed into a sleepy agricultural village where 
cows graze in the abandoned places and country 
roads with mire and dust run past rude walls and 
dirty alleys to the petty margrave's castle. If 
"happy is that people that has no history" then 
Florence, as we must now learn to call her, has been 
exceptionally blessed, for there is no record of the 
great transformation. We can not err greatly, how- 
ever, in picturing the change from enterprising 
growth to stagnation and decay. The paralysis of 
authority, the increase of lawlessness, the decline of 
commerce, the straitened life, the exodus of popula- 
tion, and the decay of culture, these are an inexorable 
sequence. There came a time when there were no 
more shows in the arena. Abandoned to miscella- 

20 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



neous uses, it became a market, a tenement, a stable, 
then a quarry and rubbish heap. So with the tem- 
ples, the shrines of gods no longer reverenced. So 
with all else that changed conditions have rendered 
useless. It has been a time of sorry undoing. 

There has been construction, too, but rude and 
simple, such as only a later age surfeited with ele- 
gance will be able to call beautiful. Houses are 
bare and comfortless, and even the churches in the 
building of which fear of the unseen powers prompts 
to man's utmost effort, are devoid of ornament and 
more akin to the fortress than the temple. From 
this simplification of life which has everywhere 
taken place, Florence is not exempt. She is one of 
the crumbs and not unlike the others. 

And now again we will drop the curtain, leaving 
the generations to shift the scenery upon the stage. 



21 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



IV 

It is difficult to see in the busy city before us the 
sleepy burg of two and a half centuries before. 
Though still a small city — ^you can walk all round it 
in a couple of hours — Florence has grown beyond 
recognition and the new walls are of much wider 
circuit than those we knew. Even so the city in 
its continuing growth crowds hard against them and 
is compelled to accommodate itself to narrow quar- 
ters. There are no waste spaces now, and the 
streets, often too narrow for two carts to pass, are 
grudgingly allowed only on the ground level. Pro- 
jecting upper stories economize the previous space 
above and afford shade from the somewhat too 
ardent sun. The houses, built on surprisingly narrow 
foundations, rise to an imposing height and, as if 
that were not enough, they are surmounted by a 
tower half as big as themselves, square and plain 
and bare of ornament, but crowding menacingly to 
the front as if they needed no excuse for their exist- 
ence. Their roofs, too, are not provided with 
cornices or overhanging eaves but are surmounted 
by crenellated battlements hke the castles that we 
had previously noticed on the hilltops. 

We wonder what such a house is like inside. 

22 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



Perhaps we can get a glimpse through the windows. 
But now that we look for the windows we notice 
for the first time that there are none which will 
serve otir purpose. The lowest are from eight to 
twelve feet from the ground, and even so they are 
scarce large enough for cellar windows, and are 
barred with iron rods an inch thick, set upright 
and crosswise and close together. Higher up there 
are real windows, but still small and with substantial 
shutters that can be closed in the case of need. 
Even the door is barely large enough to admit a 
single person, and most forbiddingly ironclad. Per- 
haps we have struck the jail by accident. But no; 
they are all alike. Decidedly, the Florentine is 
prepared for emergencies. 

The nature of these emergencies is made clear as 
we turn the comer. There is a clamor and a din 
of arms as well as of voices, between two groups 
who are ranged around two contestants armed to 
the teeth. There are bruises and cuts and fallen 
partisans, and finally, of course, a beaten party 
which falls back sullenly down a narrow street. We 
have scarce time to realize what is happening when 
the door of a high house opens, and the beaten 
leader backs into it. There is a rush of the victors 
to enter, a slamming of the door and a creaking of 
bolts, and meanwhile a shying of stones or a shower 
of boiling water from the top of the tall tower 
already referred to, and the baffled victor withdraws 
muttering and cursing. 

23 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



This astounding breach of the peace within the 
very walls piques our curiosity. Who are these 
brigands and how did they ever penetrate into the 
city? There are smiles at our ignorance, and we are 
assured that we have done the contestants grave 
injustice. They are not brigands but the heads of 
noble Florentine families maintaining the honor of 
their house and Florentine tradition. Within these 
stem dwellings there is peace, obedience, the will of 
a master, but between them there is feud, feud that 
none would deign to forgive or forget, and the 
streets are the inevitable scene of conflict. 

But why this conflict? What is all the war about? 
The answer is not easy. We are told that it is of 
very long standing and that the sons grow up to 
fight because their fathers fought before them. The 
fighting is quite inevitable and for that matter, 
quite congenial, and just what it is about is of minor 
importance. To an outsider the real things do not 
seem so very important nor the important things 
so very real. At first we learn only that there are 
two great factions, each with its catch-word, Guelf 
and Ghibelline. The Guelfs are the party of the 
Pope who claims a sort of suzerainty over Florence, 
while the Ghibellines are the party of the Emperor 
whose shadowy claim to Florentine allegiance is 
in potential conflict with papal prerogative. Both 
parties are loud in their protestations of allegiance 
and implacable in their hostility, but it does not 
take us long to discover that with all their talk of 

24 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



the good emperor or the pope angelico who shall 
some day come and set things right, these warring 
factions are perfectly agreed on one point, namely, 
that they want no interference from these or anyone 
else. They want to be left alone to fight it out as 
they see fit. So long as pope and emperor do not 
take their rights too seriously, they can cotint on 
lusty partisanship from their respective parties, but 
woe to either if he attempts to meddle with Floren- 
tine affairs. There is one thing that every Florentine 
loves better than his party, better even than his 
feuds and his fightings, and that is Florence and 
her liberties. It is a strange combination, this 
primitive simplicity of household rule coping with 
the 'nfinite restiveness of modem life. The new 
wine has been put into old bottles, and the bottles 
are ready to burst. 

But our walk must go farther or it will leave us 
more puzzled than enlightened. A few steps bring 
us to a maze of streets packed with the busiest and 
cleverest artisans in the world. Here one is giving 
the last touches to an artistic copper vessel which 
without joints or solder he has fashioned from a 
single piece. Another is riveting a piece of armor, 
another engraving with infinite deftness a golden 
brooch. There are whole streets given over to 
cloth-dressers, who give work to the spinners and 
weavers and fullers and dyers in numberless back 
rooms and attics. There are smiths, and carvers 
of wood and gilders, and joiners, and fashioners of 

25 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



beautiful things in clay and wood and bronze and 
iron and gold, in marble from Carrara and alabaster 
from Volterra. Buyers throng the shops or con- 
gregate in the crowded markets, laying in stores 
of precious wares even for distant India or semi- 
barbarous Britain; and, strangest of all, they pay 
for their purchases in coins that do not have to be 
weighed, and which, bearing the stamp and seal of 
Florence, are called florins, that is short for Floren- 
tines. 

As we watch the infinite dexterity of these artisans, 
we cannot but be impressed by their resoluteness 
and self-sufficiency. They never hesitate, fumble, 
or spoil. They work with automatic precision, as 
though they had fashioned the same thing find 
wrought the same design a hundred times before. 
The brain is as busy as the hand and does its part 
as easily and as well. There is no waiting for 
another to suggest or direct, no helplessness or 
dependence. From childliood up they have learned 
to think their own thoughts, to be self-sufficient, 
independent, and alert. And how plain it is that 
this habit of mind, once deeply implanted, will 
assert itself in other than industrial connections. 
A nation of tillers of the soil, or of factory hands and 
automatic machine stuff ers, may tolerate a Caesar; 
a nation of artisans never. Will democracy survive 
the extinction of artisanship? There is nothing in 
history to warrant the hope. 

This, then, is the new wine that is bursting the 

26 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



old bottles. Mediaeval Florence has awakened from 
her long sleep and has become the center of that 
modem life that we call industry. The great change 
has come about so naturally and started so un- 
obtrusively that it is as difficult to locate its be- 
ginning as it is to find the seed which, germinating 
long ago, has become a great tree whose mighty 
roots have split the rock on which it grew. Some- 
body back in the sleepy old burg whose interests 
had scarcely extended hitherto beyond the adjoining 
fields, began to do something better than it had 
been done before. We do not know what or why. 
Perhaps it was a new discovery or invention, or 
maybe just a greater patience and a finer taste. 
Whether embodied in trade secret or in tradition, 
it persisted and the contagion spread. Soon it was 
rumored that a better finished cloth could be ob- 
tained in Florence than was produced elsewhere, 
and some came or sent to procure it. Emulation 
brought other buyers and stimulated other producers. 
Trade became regular and brought prosperity to 
those whose enterprise had made it possible. 

Soon another step was taken. The superiority 
of Florentine cloth lay in its finish, not in its ma- 
terial or fabric. It was the finish that brought the 
profit, not the spinning and weaving which the 
Florentine had to do on even terms with others. 
As the demand for his cloth increased, the Floren- 
tine had the bright idea of buying the raw fabric 
from other towns and bringing it to Florence to be 

27 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



finished. He thus managed to concentrate his ener- 
gies upon the more profitable part of the process. 
This meant more buying and selling, more trans- 
portation, more commerce. The packhorses were 
now loaded, going and coming, and Florence became 
busier and richer. Cloth was the great staple, but 
not the only one. The other crafts were stimulated 
and new ones came into being, tintil the city became 
the hive of industry that we find it. It is a pro- 
found change through which Florence and many 
another community is passing. The old barbaric 
simpHcity and isolation are giving way to wealth 
and luxury, but at the expense of self-sufficiency 
and independence. Specialization and commerce are 
the necessary conditions to which the ampler life 
owes its precarious existence. 

But no old order changes giving place to new 
without protest and opposition. The present case 
is no exception. The trouble is that the new order 
has turned things upside down. The new wealth 
has not accrued to the markgraves and petty 
lordHngs in the hilltop castles but has quietly passed 
them by. A set of new leaders, men of great energy 
and foresight but without title or imperial warrant, 
have been directing the new movement and ac- 
quiring its emoluments. This is galling enough, but 
when the serf runs away from the lordling's estate 
to seek employment in the crafts of the town, the 
grievance is obvious. The old and new order are 
at feud, 

28 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



Unforttinately there has been occasion for daily 
friction. The castles stood by the highway along 
which passes the packhorse, to and fro, with the 
wares of Florence. An old right based on a vague 
duty of protection entitled the owner to levy toll 
on the passing traffic. Here was an opportunity 
to intercept his share of the profits, an opportunity 
which we may assume that he has not always used 
with moderation. Even the traditional levy becomes 
exorbitant when the commerce has increased a htm- 
dred fold. Yet what castle owner could see it so? 
Equally, what merchant could see it otherwise? As 
commerce, now furnishing its own protection, asks 
naught of the lord, his service has become negligible 
and his charges extortionate. Friction has led to 
blows and finally to a definite policy of extermina- 
tion. The Florentines have attacked the castles 
one by one, captured them, and put an end to their 
odious exactions. It was a harsh policy but not 
unprovoked, and carried through, on the whole, 
with moderation. The Florentines have not killed 
their enemies or imprisoned them, or even con- 
fiscated their property. They have aimed simply to 
remove their obstruction. 

But victory, as so often happens, has had its 
embarrassments. What should be done with these 
beaten enemies, men not the most progressive, if 
you will, but men of wealth and prestige and above 
all, men who bear the emperor's warrant? Their 
enmity is inevitable. Left to themselves, they would 

29 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



certainly conspire against Florence. The situation 
is complicated by the fact that other cities are 
undergoing the same transformation as Florence and 
are mortally jealous of her. In principle they have 
no more in common with these bearers of the em- 
peror's warrant than Florence, but- that does not 
prevent them from welcoming their alliance against 
the hated rival. Indeed Siena and others have 
already begtin to shout for the emperor in antici- 
pation. 

The Florentines have seen all this, and realizing 
that it would not do to permit so dangerous an 
alliance, they have decided that these beaten 
enemies must come and live in Florence where they 
can keep watch of them. It is a hazardous expedient, 
however necessary. Suppose France had insisted 
as a condition of peace that Ludendorf and Hin- 
denburg and a few thousand Junkers should come 
and live in Paris. What an interesting social and 
political situation it would have produced ! 

The Tuscan Junkers have come and built their 
high houses as nearly as possible like the castles 
they have left. Their neighbors have done the 
same. The city was crowded already and eligible 
building sites are few and close together. The houses 
of opposing factions were often within speaking 
distance, and from windows or tower or fighting 
battlement their owners could exchange those ameni- 
ties which prepare the way for the scenes we have 
witnessed on our arrival. The lesser folk gradually 

30 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



have lined up on the one side or the other as per- 
sonal interest or private grudge might dictate. The 
original cause of division is largely forgotten, being 
replaced bv private feuds, business rivalries, polit- 
ical grievances, and the like, but the emperor and 
his inevitable counterpart, the pope, still serve as 
slogans for factions that have not the least regard 
for their interests and who would equally resent 
their dictation. After endtiring this for a century, 
the Florentines have concluded that their clemency 
has been mistaken. They have expelled the Ghibel- 
lines, confiscated their property, even torn down 
their houses, and branded them as traitors. 

But it is one thing to expel the Ghibellines and 
quite another to exorcise the spirit which they 
brought with them. Private feuds now seam the 
life of Florence in every direction. True, all can 
now shout for the pope — though with the Ghibellines 
gone it isn't so very exciting — but the Florentines 
continue to quarrel about pretty much everything 
else. Indeed, the spirit of faction is far too pervasive 
to be charged to the account of a few Junkers. 
Mediaeval Florence has awakened from her long 
sleep and has become the center of that modern life 
which we call industry. Infinitely more live and 
creative, life has become, infinitely better worth 
while, perhaps we should say, for the change is 
very much to our liking, but with it has come the 
microbe of turbulence and unrest. With the ex- 
pulsion of the Ghibellines the last remnants of the 

31 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



Junker aristocracy have disappeared, and now the 
powerful families of the new order are trying, singly 
and in groups, to devise a form of government which 
shall be adapted to a people whose dominant char- 
acteristic is that they do not wish to be governed 
at all. A beginning has indeed been made, and under 
such a mayor as we began with in this year of our 
Lord, 1300, the government was a force to be reck- 
oned with. He was a man of uncommon parts, this 
gonfalonier or standard bearer, one Alghieri by name, 
more familiarly known as Dante; but Florence has 
proved to be too much even for him, and he is now 
in exile. 

But there are not a few indications that farther 
changes are impending. Florence is growing tired 
of herself. It is not so very long since, in one of 
those street forays already referred to, one partisan 
carried the matter to a disastrous excess by setting 
fire to the shop of a hated rival when the wind was 
high. The flames spread to neighboring shops and 
soon a whole quarter was in ashes. The flames even 
laid hold of a church in their path which was packed, 
according to the custom of the time, with waxen 
images of worthy burghers who, careful for their 
souls' salvation, had commended themselves to their 
patron saint by these tangible reminders of their 
importance. With impartial fury the fire consumed 
the fruits of industry and the emblems of piety 
alike. There was many an impoverished Florentine 
that night who, while not questioning the natural 

32 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



and inalienable right of men to have their feuds and 
to fight them out on occasion, queried whether it was 
not possible to have too much of a good thing and 
whether some authority should not be established 
to umpire the game and keep the contestants inside 
the ring. The malady is working out its own cure. 
Industry has bred independence, and this has 
resulted in turbulence and disorder. But industry 
has created wealth, and wealth now as always is 
crying out for order and protection. The man who 
owns property has given bonds to keep the peace 
which is one of the best of reasons why no man should 
be wholly disinherited. 

And now once more we will withdraw from the 
busy scene and give Florence a century and a half 
to work out her own salvation. 



33 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



V 

It is with a mingled sense of familiarity and change 
that we enter this city of the mid-fifteenth century. 
The Florentines have not been idle, if we may judge 
by the vast marble churches whose sculptured 
facades and slender campaniH and towering domes 
look down upon the tallest towers of the old castle 
houses and dwarf the quaint old cathedral of St. John 
which used to seem so imposing. Even the old 
cathedral, though superseded, has gotten a sheath- 
ing of marble and new doors, such doors as the sim 
never saw before since it made the rounds of the 
planet. The castle houses, though still here, most 
of them, are a good deal remodeled, and upon such 
of the towers as remain, where of old were kept the 
handy piles of stone for warlike use, are now seen 
flower pots and clothes lines that point to a decay of 
martial spirit. And noting this, we are reminded 
that we have seen no battles in the streets and that 
certain functionaries stationed there show signs of 
interfering with those who would carry their dis- 
putes beyond the point of wordy altercation. 

As our walk takes us into the more spacious 
streets we obser\^e that many of the old narrow 
battlemented houses have disappeared and that their 

34 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



place has been taken by vast palaces whose cut- 
stone fronts and rich overhanging cornices and 
spacious doorways are but elegant reminiscences of 
the stem castles which they have superseded. Evi- 
dently wealth has increased in the interval, as these 
spacious structures with their prodigal occupancy 
of precious space, attest, and yet not universally, 
if we may judge by what we see in less favored 
streets. Here again workmen swarm as of old, but 
not all have bettered their condition in this palace 
building era. It is even rumored that a young man 
cannot start now, as once he could, by earning skill 
and outfit for himself; but that it has become cus- 
tomary to borrow money for the outfit from certain 
persons who make a specialty of such loans, and 
that the relations thus established are often long 
continued and sometimes irksome. We wonder how 
these less favored citizens get along with their 
affluent neighbors who live in the big houses in the 
broad streets. Does the old method of drawing the 
name of the gonfalonier by lot from a representative 
list of citizens still persist? If so, there must be 
awkward predicaments sometimes when an artisan 
bears rule over the millionaire to whom he is in debt 
for his tools. 

But it is plain that we are novices. We are told 
that no such embarrassment occurs. Chance has 
willed for a long time that the name drawn should 
be that of a well-to-do citizen more or less experi- 
enced in public affairs, a citizen, too, in uniform 

35 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



agreement with the ruling policy and spirit of the 
republic. Just why this happy discrimination of 
change, no one seems to know. Perhaps Providence 
guides the choice according to the old and somewhat 
discredited view; or, as the less reverent have been 
known to suggest, something may have happened 
to the names in the box. No one seems to know, and, 
stranger still, no one seems greatly to care. We are 
told that it does not amount to so much to be 
gonfalonier as it once did, and that people care less 
about it now that the really important questions are 
decided by Cosimo. 

Cosimo! Here is a new name. Evidently we 
have found a clew that it will pay us to follow up. 
The inquiry leads us back a long way, almost back 
to the time of our former visit. And this, in brief, 
is the result. 

Cosimo is the head of a very old and wealthy 
family, one of the families, indeed, that were living 
in the high towered houses at the time of our former 
vivSit. It was a family of humble origin, however, 
boasting no imperial warrant or blue blood, and less 
inclined than some others to forget its plebeian 
affinities. The foundations of its fortunes had been 
laid in the not very highly regarded business of pill 
selling, and so, in default of our handy device of 
family names, they are known as the pillsellers, or 
Medici. It is, to be sure, a very long time since they 
have done any pillselling, so long, indeed, that the 
name, associated with their later and greater doings, 

36 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



has acquired a new meaning, but they seem no wise 
ashamed of it, and even decorate their new coat 
of arms with pills. Like many another Florentine 
family, they have lent their surplus capital on 
favorable terms, rather against the rules of the 
church, to be sure, which forbid the taking of 
interest, but in this case as in so many others, 
the church ;has been mistaken in its judgment of 
business ethics, and the pillsellers see it. Unlike 
most wealthy families, however, the pillsellers have 
specialized in a line of business investment commonly 
regarded as precarious. They seem never to have 
lost touch with the hiimbler classes out of whose 
ranks they have arisen, and while others have sought 
borrowers of means, who could give tangible security 
for their loan, the pillsellers early began to choose 
promising young men, and start them in business 
with only a character security. Sometimes, of course, 
they have lost, but probably no oftener than the 
others. Moreover, their protegees are likely to be 
business clients for the rest of their lives, and to 
recognize a debt of gratitude long after the other 
debt has been paid. 

Little by little this informal money lending has 
grown into banking. In common with other wealthy 
families, the pillsellers have elaborated that great 
science which, more than any other, lies at the 
foimdation of modem industry. They have helped 
to bring about the coinage of the golden florin ; they 
have devised bills of exchange to save transporting 

37 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



money; they have undertaken the safe keeping of 
other peoples' money, and, finding that they can 
count on large sums pretty constantly from that 
source, they have loaned it on interest. Their 
transactions have grown to immense proportions; 
and they have become the creditors of kings, not 
neglecting, meanwhile, the promising youth whose 
interests they could safely promote, and who will 
be likely to be a staunch Medican, a pillsellerite, 
forever afterward, in consequence of their assist- 
ance. The pillsellers, you see, are good business men 
gifted with unfailing good sense, and favored with 
iminterrupted good fortune, for the two are not 
greatly different. 

But the pillsellers are more than business men. 
From a very early date they have shown a large 
interest in public affairs. Before the days of Dante, 
a pillseller,was gonfalonier of Florence. But for the 
most part, they do not seem to have been aspirants 
for office. They are merely influential citizens whose 
word carries weight simply because they show \in- 
erring judgment in questions of public policy. Their 
supremacy has' rested from the first simply upon 
their record of sagacity and wisdom, the most 
legitimate of all possible titles to power. Nor is 
there reason to doubt their disinterestedness as such 
things go. Of course they have been guided largely 
by their own business interests, but they sincerely 
believe that the general interest is identical with their 
own, and, as matters stand, they have been essen- 

38 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



tially correct. The fact that a man gains by a given 
policy does not prove that he is selfish in supporting 
it. Who is a manufacturer and does not believe 
that the welfare of the nation depends on the policy 
of protection? V/ho is a receiver of a fixed salary 
and does not feel that it would be disastrous to lessen 
the purchasing power of money? The pillsellers are 
human and judge public interests by their own; but 
they have judged broadly and wisely, and Florence 
has found her interest in following their judgment. 
For two generations now, this guidance of public 
affairs has been their dominant function. A certain 
John the pillseller, through his long life, acquired a 
reputation so great that deference to his judgment 
became a habit. Almost without knowing it, he 
became the responsible head of the state, and found 
himself compelled to do what was doubtless suf- 
ficiently to his liking, namely, to organize a compact 
body of supporters, thwart opposition, and become 
responsible not only for suggesting, but for executing, 
the policy of the government. Something of the 
sort, of course, the pillsellers had done already, but 
the policy of the pillsellers now took more definite 
shape. Loans were placed systematically where they 
would win an adherent or embarrass an opponent. 
Nothing did so much to disarm an irreconcilable 
as to get a mortgage on his property. If he could 
not be induced to become a debtor, he suddenly 
found his competitors underselling him, presumably 
because they were obtaining funds on more favorable 

39 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



terms than he. Careful planning predetermined 
the resufts of popular elections. In all this there 
was doubtless much that would not bear the light. 
There is apt to be in practical politics. It is perhaps 
only fair to remember that the opponents thus 
silenced were often selfish, shortsighted, and dema- 
gogic; that the methods used against them were 
perfectly acceptable to them; that no agreement 
on a wise policy could have been effected by purely 
rational means ; and finally and above all,, that the 
pohcy adopted was, in general, wise and just, that 
no effort was made to rob the state for private ends, 
and that Florence prospered under the new regime. 
As the representative of wealth the new manage- 
ment was the uncompromising foe of disorder and 
anarchy. Private feuds smouldered low, street riots 
were suppressed, justice was meted out in the courts, 
and industry prospered in all her goings. John the 
pillseller was no idealist, though he had his ideals. 
He took men as he found them, never asking the 
impossible of them, playing off their meannesses and 
sordid passions against one another, and giving to 
each the incentive suited to his nature. He was no 
reformer, no zealot. He strove to make a working 
arrangement with the material at hand. He was 
disinterested and sagacious beyond the measure of 
most. It was with not a little anxiety and regret 
that the Florentines laid him to rest, full of years 
and of honors, not knowing what would be the out- 
come under the leadership of the youthful grandson, 

40 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



Cosimo, who was to succeed to his fortune and his 
responsibilities. 

It was indeed a perilous moment for the untried 
youth, for the opposition, always powerful, now saw 
its opportunity. A swift alliance of rivals in busi- 
ness and politics headed by men of ability and 
decision, overthrew the established order, and gave 
Florence new masters. Cosimo was thrown into 
prison, and his friends scattered. A part of the new 
cabal urged his execution, but that conscience which 
doth make cowards of us all was too much for these 
men, who were by no means dead to traditions of 
honor, and exile was decreed instead. 

Now the sagacity of the pillsellers became ap- 
parent. Suddenly the little traders and artisans of 
Florence found that the peoples' bank could no 
longer extend to them the accustomed accommoda- 
tion. Banks with other affiliations would not, and, 
for a time, could not, take its place. Above all 
the new rulers could not at once create a con- 
stituency of men who owed to them their business 
existence. The new rulers had certain powerful 
business interests behind them, but the people gravi- 
tated to the side of the family which had so con- 
spicuously identified its fortunes with the interests 
of himible citizens. Even big business was sensitive 
to any injudicious move in public policy. There 
was brief but sullen acquiesence in the new order of 
things, during which the new leaders vied with their 
predecessors in sagacity and statesmanship. But 

41 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



the first slip produced a clamor, a demonstration, 
then a revolution ending in the recall of Cosimo 
and the expulsion of his enemies. 

The young man returned in state and with a 
following that increased as he approached, until 
when he entered Florence, his retinue was that of a 
prince. HumiHty was not his characteristic but his 
head was not turned. He set to work with the utmost 
energy to restore the working efficiency of the organi- 
zation and to entrench its power. The first thing 
was to fix the box of names from which the officers 
were drawn by lot, for it must be remembered that 
all this time the pillsellers and their chief supporters 
held no ofiice. The box of names once fixed — by 
perfunctory but perfectly regular popular vote — 
this has since given no trouble. The offices have 
been apportioned to faithful and docile men who 
are gratified by the semblance of power and are 
willing loyally to obey orders. Such arrangements 
are not unknown in other times, but my impression 
is that they seldom work quite so smoothly as imder 
Cosimo. Affairs of state have been managed with 
the same sagacity and public spirit as before, as the 
growing power and broadening influence of Florence 
attest. 

The family fortunes, too, have not been neglected, 
and Cosimo has found that things come decidedly 
his way. Not only has the bank prospered in com- 
mon with the city, but new sources of profit have 
opened. There are chances for foreign loans, and 

42 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



what could be more natural than that these loans 
should be placed with a bank which has so much 
power to insure Florentine friendship? Cosimo has 
known how to turn everything to hand, weaving the 
gossamer web of debt about states and princes, until 
they are helpless in the toils of his subtle diplomacy. 
Not that diplomatic ends ever blind him to the 
importance of getting good interest, but he possesses 
the rare faculty of killing two birds with every stone 
he throws. There was not long since a great council 
of the empire up at Constance at which the emperor 
presided over grave discussions of theology, the 
principal result of which was the burning of one 
more heretic. Cosimo was present as a pillar of the 
orthodox party — Cosimo and his kind are always 
orthodox — and incidentally he arranged a loan with 
the ever impecunious emperor on which he cleared 
several million florins. It is all right enough. He 
is sincere in his orthodoxy, even if it is not the thing 
he lies awake nights to think about. There are 
those who have the real microbe who do not have 
it very hard. Meanwhile Cosimo has been false to 
no trust reposed in him. The citizens of Florence 
knew that he would return with added wealth and 
prestige, and they felt sure that both would accrue 
to their benefit, and they were right. 

But there has been a new development in pill- 
seller policy. Florence has grown rich, and habits 
have changed accordingly. Men need much guid- 
ance in making money, but they need much more 

43 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



in spending it. It suits both the tastes and the 
interests of Cosimo to assume the leadership of 
Florence in the formation of those tastes and habits 
which are the necessary condition of wealth's doing 
us any good. Florence in her wealth getting has been 
as materiahstic and parvenu as any American city, 
and she owes it in no small degree to this wonderful 
family that she has become cultured as well as rich. 
Cosimo is admirably fitted to lead in this new 
development. He is shrewd and sagacious, but he 
loves beauty, culture, refinement — in short the higher 
things of life. It is his pleasure to patronize learning 
and art, and he has done so discriminatingly. No 
man can ever successfully teach men to love the 
best things unless he himself loves them. Equally 
free from asceticism and voluptuousness, he has 
played admirably the role which fortune has assigned 
him. 

But it has also been good policy. There were 
disappointed and sullen rivals in Florence who might 
have nursed dangerous ambitions. There were still 
those who remembered that Florentines were once 
free and who aspired to be liberators. Nothing 
could be more desirable than to turn these dan- 
gerous rivalries into new channels, and to substitute 
culture ideals for political ideals as the goal of 
private ambition. So Cosimo has adopted the policy 
of Pisistratus and Pericles and with even greater 
success. We are amazed at his liberality and the 
wide range of his interests. The cliief scvdptors and 

44 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



painters have all been in his employ. His agents in 
Constantinople have standing orders to buy at any 
price any Greek manuscript that comes upon the 
market. In some cases scholars have been given 
a standing account at the bank and their drafts 
honored at sight. Think of it, you whose devotion 
to the cause of learning has laid upon you a vow of 
poverty ! It is easy to understand that art flourishes, 
for back of this boundless liberality is discrimina- 
tion, devotion, real interest. And the spirit has 
been contagious. New rivalries have brought new 
gifts, and have forced with hothouse rapidity the 
aesthetic development of a singularly aesthetic 
people. It is with the consciousness of a great task 
greatly accomplished that Cosimo looks back over a 
life now drawing to its close. The murmurings have 
died away and the jealousies have been smothered 
under the growing sense of the splendor of his 
achievement. In the same grave with his beloved 
Donatello, there in front of the high altar of San 
Lorenzo, he has asked to be buried, where a grateful 
people will soon write upon the marble above him: 
"Cosimo, Pater Patriae." 



45 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



VI 

It is with eager expectancy that we retiim, after 
a brief generation, to this center of brimming life. 
Things must have happened since we left. In a 
situation so tense, with life so d3rnamic, and an 
equilibrium so delicate, the Hfe of Florence can not 
have remained uneventful. 

We are not to be disappointed. The march of 
events has been at quickened pace in the interval 
and centuries have been packed into a lifetime. 
Cosimo has passed as was foreseen, as has his 
talented and worthy son, after all too brief an experi- 
ence of his admirable management. Once more the 
fortunes of family and state have been confided to 
a youth, the incomparable Lorenzo. It speaks much 
for the record of this wonderful family that at the 
age of twenty this youth should have been formally 
requested by a deputation of representative citizens 
to take the direction of Florentine affairs. If our 
knowledge of the all powerful organization which 
holds Florence in its grip somewhat tempers the 
significance of this expression of confidence, it must 
be remembered that Lorenzo has already won his 
spurs at the age of sixteen in a difficult diplomatic 
mission to the court of Milan which he discharged 

46 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



with consummate ability. With becoming modesty 
but with legitimate confidence, therefore, he has 
accepted the inevitable commission. 

The burden has not grown lighter with the years 
nor has the new leadership passed unchallenged. 
It is significant, however, of the change wrought by 
the genius of Cosimo that the opposition encotmtered 
by Lorenzo has come, not from rival Florentines 
but from rival states. He early fotind it necessary 
to thwart the pope in an ambitous scheme of state- 
building which he deemed inimical to Florentine 
interests. The pope thereupon entered into a con- 
spiracy with certain disaffected Florentines to kill 
both Lorenzo and his brother. It is characteristic 
of the times that the arch-conspirator in such a 
scheme should have been the pope, that his local 
manager should have been the archbishop of 
Florence, that the person chosen to strike the blow 
should have been a priest, that the place chosen 
should have been a church and the occasion selected 
the celebration of high mass. Characteristic of the 
times, I say, not of the church. Such means are 
as repugnant to the Vatican now as to ourselves, 
but the age had not outgrown the earlier tradition 
of violence, and institutions are seldom wholly 
exempt from the spirit of the age. 

The plot failed in its main object. The brother 
was killed but Lorenzo escaped. Then Florence, 
the old-time Guelf stronghold and chief partisan of 
the pope, broke forth in fury at this attack upon 

47 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



her national independence. Divining the soiirce of 
the attack, she hung the archbishop by the neck from 
his palace window. His Florentine accomplices 
were hunted and exterminated. Popular fury raved 
itself out. 

The pope was furious but dissembling. While dis- 
claiming complicity in the plot, he demanded that 
Florence expel the Medici, and when this was refused, 
he excommunicated the whole city. Though gravely 
handicapped by the ban, the Florentines had no 
thought of yielding. Soon Florence foimd herself 
confronted by a powerful coalition of states which 
she was imable to resist. The war went steadily 
against her and she seemed on the brink of ruin, 
when Lorenzo took one of those great resolves that 
are the privilege of genius. Unarmed and alone he 
embarked at Leghorn, and sailed to Naples, the 
capital of the most perfidious of his foes. He was 
still young, sickly, and homely to look upon, but he 
knew his power. He knew that the very perfidy 
of the king made it easy to detach him from the 
alliance, if he could see his interest in betraying his 
allies. We shall never know the secret of that 
encoimter between coarse self interest and subtle 
intellect. We can but guess what were the arguments 
used, what the nameless charm by which this most 
gifted of Florentines drew the toils around his clumsy 
antagonist. Suffice it to say that when Lorenzo 
disembarked again at Leghorn, he bore with 
him the document, signed and sealed, of an 

48 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



alliance with the King of Naples. This threw the 
balance heavily on the side of Florence and made 
peace inevitable. The pope, again baffled, was at 
the end of his resources. 

Imagine what the Florentines think of this won- 
derful youth, risking his life in a self -assumed role, 
saving his country in a bloodless encounter, and 
snatching the laurels from heads grown gray in 
scheming and diplomacy. Lorenzo's throne has ever 
since been the firmest in Europe. Every subsequent 
move has confirmed his power. The other states 
have found themselves entangled in the meshes of 
diplomacy, played off against one another, till in- 
dependent action has become impossible. Florence 
is the arbiter of Italy. 

And now the Medicean policy has received the 
further development that changing circumstances 
and the personality of Lorenzo require. The func- 
tions of the great head of the house have become 
more avowedly public. He is more completely busied 
with affairs of state and less free to attend to his own. 
Inevitably the family fortune has suffered, partly 
from neglect, more from the heavier outlay required 
by the princely role which the genius of the family 
has created. The splendor of the throne is insepar- 
able from its grandeur and power. Insensibly the 
royal fimction of the family has become a charge 
upon the state. Doubtless definite items were first 
charged to public account — items easily justified 
in connection with definite services — then more and 

49 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



vaguer items, and finally a princely income is now 
systematically diverted into the family coffers. Tech- 
nically this is embezzlement, for Lorenzo is in name 
only a private citizen. But in fact he is a prince, 
and his functions wholly public. His services are 
indubitable and his resources inadequate. The 
laborer, it may be argued, is worthy of his hire. 
But it is a weakness that the laborer can show no 
regular credentials and has to be paid on the sly. 
The present is a moment of transition from citizen- 
ship to kingship, a moment in which neither the 
ethics nor the mechanism of finance is sufficiently 
elaborated to suit the occasion. How can he enter 
the field of competitive business with any fairness 
to his private rivals? Yet how can he meet his 
enormous responsibilities in default of the income 
which he is thus forbidden to secure? It is a difficult 
situation in which transactions that seem necessary 
and just to the sympathetic are sure to wear the 
ugly guise of theft to the envious and tmreconciled. 
It is a delicate matter for an unofficial public servant 
to determine his own remuneration and help himself 
from the public chest without treasury warrant or 
audit for his account. It is not clear that Lorenzo 
has proved equal to the requirement. It is a com- 
plicated question, not easy to settle, and we may as 
well wait till the judgment day. 

But it is in the new role of art patron and culture 
leader of Florence that Lorenzo has attained his 
highest eminence. Liberal by nature and now 

50 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



having the resources of a rich state at his disposal, 
his patronage of art has become most mimiiicent. 
But the patronage of art means more than the 
spending of money. Great as is the power of wealth, 
it can as easily hinder as help the cause of culture. 
It all depends on what you spend your money for. 
Lorenzo is in his tastes a refined Epicurean. For 
him Puritanism and asceticism have no attractions. 
But the spirit of indulgence is in him so tempered 
by refinement and good taste that it seldom wears 
the ugly aspect of vice or sensuality. The coarser 
lusts are to him not so much wicked as vulgar and 
inartistic. Good taste will go a long way toward 
doing the work of conscience, and it is the comer 
stone of Lorenzo's character. Under his subtle 
leadership the Florentine love of pleastire has grown 
into a beauty cult, in which art flourishes as it has 
flourished but once before in human history. Him- 
self a poet and scholar of no mean attainments, 
Lorenzo never mistakes an artist, a philosopher, a 
scholar. His dreamy eye unerringly detects beauty 
in all its forms, distinguishing the true from the 
false, the fundamental from the local and temporary, 
the beautiful from the whimsical, the sensational, 
and the clever. Around his table and living upon 
his bounty sit the most remarkable group of men — 
scholars, poets, philosophers, artists — ever gathered 
under a single roof. By what magic does he hold 
these independent spirits in leash ? By what divina- 
tion has he foreseen their unrevealed possibilities? 

51 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



And who but the inscrutable Lorenzo would have 
taken into his home and into his intimate favor this 
unprepossessing youth, Michelangelo? 

Shallow criticism finds an easy mark in the great 
magician. It is easy to point out his shortcomings, 
to note his disparagement of austere righteousness, 
his compromises with conscience, his too complacent 
acceptance of the foibles of men which he under- 
stands so well how to manipulate for his ptupose. 
It is not so easy to estimate his services to public 
order or the value of that ideal of beauty which to 
the many is not yet revealed. 

None the less there are ominous signs that the 
brilliant regime of the Medici has been weighed in 
the balance and foimd wanting. Criticism, mo- 
mentarily hushed as the great Magnifico lies upon 
his death bed, has of late grown menacing. The 
impetus which circumstance and genius have given 
to the great culture movement has spent itself, 
and the lassitude that follows strenuous exertion is 
manifesting itself in signs of restiveness and reaction. 
The neo-pagan culture is no longer a novelty and is 
going out of fashion. 

But there are deeper reasons for reaction, reasons 
long held in leash, but now released by the changing 
temper. The cult of pleasure which has impelled 
the few of the noblest flights of fancy and the highest 
inspiration, has meant for many the complacent 
gratification of passion. The subtle philosophy of 
revised Platonism, with all its lofty idealism, has 

52 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



wrought havoc with the simple faith that once kept 
men in the fear of the Lord. Right and wrong, 
become matters of taste, have lost their cogency to 
the minds of the many who see in matters of taste 
only personal liking and caprice. Undeniably the 
urbanity of the times hides much that is unsightly 
in private life. Even in the church and the cloister 
cultiire and intellectual subtlety have taken the 
place of devotion and chastening of spirit. 

This growing murmur of criticism has recently 
burst into a storm of protest in the voice of a terrible 
monk whose preaching is now the sensation of 
Florence. Recently appointed prior of San Marco, 
one of the most complacent of Medicean strongholds, 
he has effected an almost immediate revolution. 
The artistic dilettantism, the mimdane philosophiz- 
ing, and political scheming of this modernized 
cloister have given place to systematic devotion and 
the stem regime of St. Dominic. It is easy to imagine 
the mutterings, perhaps even the plottings and in- 
cipient revolts encountered by so drastic a reform, 
but opposition vanishes in the presence of this ter- 
rible man who, with all his inflexibility, is infinitely 
compassionate and persuasive, and whose blameless 
life silences the cavils of the few who resist his magic 
spell. Touched by his transforming eloquence the 
forgotten ideals of monk and Christian have again 
become glorious and fire the imaginations of men. 
For it must not be forgotten that Florence is still 
at heart profoundly superstitious, that this humanist 

53 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



culture which has been her pride, is a hothouse 
growth, and one by no means acclimated to the 
persistent conditions about it; finally, that the long 
emphasis upon the aesthetic to the disparagement 
of the ethical and religious has prepared men for 
reaction, while new and strange portents are appear- 
ing upon the political horizon. 

In these conditions the mission of Savonarola is 
as fire in dry stubble when the wind is high. The age- 
long superstition of the people is with him a passion. 
He believes not only in God and conscience, but 
in dreams and portents, in miracles and divine in- 
tervention in immediate and concrete forms. The 
vision of a flaming sword is a prophesy of war and 
disaster; the coming of the French king is no polit- 
ical accident but a divine judgment. To the noblest 
spirits he appeals by his lofty ideals of purity and 
his unflinching self-abnegation, while to the base 
and sordid he seems to promise the fulfillment of 
vindictive desires and the gratifications of a sensuous 
heaven. The great image is part of gold and part of 
iron and part of clay, and each finds in it after his 
kind. Savonarola and Lorenzo, as they reach out 
for the multitude, have much more in common than 
they realize, but in their appeal and seeming purpose 
they are the most absolute of irreconcilables. 
Savonarola, ascetic, narrow, intense, absolutely be- 
lieving in popular government, yet unconscious that 
his power to manipulate the assembly lies at the root 
of his belief, stands for conscience, self-denial, p\irity 

54 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



and fervid religious faith. Lorenzo, refined, subtle, 
calculating, profoundly distrustful of popular judg- 
ments, and trusting in the discipline and shrewdness 
of the chosen circle of which he is the master spirit, 
stands for culture, beauty, subtlety, and intellect. 
The cleverest of politicans is pitted against the most 
uncompromising of prophets. 

Savonarola has from the first nimibered many of 
Lorenzo's chosen circle among his listeners, and his 
sermons are the subject of not unsympathetic dis- 
cussion at the table of the Magnifico. But phil- 
osophic tolerance can not blink the fact that his 
denunciation of the existing regime, and even of 
the Medici by name, is subversive in the extreme. 
Lorenzo, too generous as well as too subtle to play 
the tyrant, has no thought of silencing his antago- 
nist. But he is none the less alive to the necessity 
of warding off this new danger to Florence and to 
the uncertain Medicean succession. He must coun- 
teract what he may not check. In the battle of 
wits and of personality he has never yet been worsted, 
and the battle is on. We recognize the first skirmish 
in the eloquent counter preaching in San Lorenzo 
where the divine message comes clothed in all the 
beauty of the Renaissance. A year ago it would 
have packed the church but today it is unheeded. 

The case is serious and one not to be handled 
by indirection. The master will try his hand. Soon 
the equanimity of San Marco is upset as never 
before. Breathless with excitement the monks an- 

55 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



notince to Savonarola: "Lorenzo is in the Garden." 
*'Has he inquired for me?" "No." "Well, then 
don't disturb him at his devotions!" 

Whatever the clever move that the far-seeing 
Lorenzo may have planned, however sincere may- 
be his desire to reach an understanding with the 
stem monk, this refusal to treat, refusal even to 
meet, makes understanding impossible. We await 
with absorbing interest the further moves of the 
master player. 

But we await in vain. The player is stricken 
and the feeble frame that has so long trammeled 
the potent spirit has at last refused its halting 
service. Even the spell of the great preacher is 
forgotten as Florence awaits in awed silence the 
news from that death-bed at Carreggi where the soul 
of a great age is passing. And the news has come. 
Amplified by busy rumor and perhaps recast in the 
poetic mold of myth, that final scene epitomizes the 
great conflict. 

Confronted by the great change which had now 
declared itself imminent, the thoughts of the dying 
man were disquieting and brought reaction of spirit. 
There were haunting spectral visions of God as the 
great avenger of wrong-doing which, in this moment, 
no beauty worship coiild lay. The deepening sense 
of disloyalty and the need of reconciliation came to 
him as it has come to so many when the flames of 
passion have died out and conscience sits solitary 
among the embers. 

56 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



Then the monk, who alone had never fawned or 
flattered, seemed the one to help him in his hour 
of need. Perhaps, too, there was the consciousness 
of the struggle which he was bequeathing to his 
headstrong son, and the hope that the monk might 
find in reconciliation with himself a pathway 
to reconciliation with his house. Men seldom act 
from wholly simple motives, and even in death 
can not ignore the habits that have ruled their 
lives. 

Called into the august presence, the monk asked 
wherefore he had been bidden. "To shrive my 
soul," said the dying man. "That I will do on 
three conditions. " " What are they ? " " First, that 
you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior." 
To this Lorenzo gave immediate assent- We may 
question whether the phrase was very meaningful 
to one who had spent a lifetime in philosophic 
skepticism; but like Savonarola, we can hardly do 
otherwise than take him at his word. "And the 
second condition?" "That you restore all monies 
illegally taken from Florence." Lorenzo knew what 
that meant. Savonarola was not one who saw in the 
role of Medici a justification for the income they had 
taken from the state. To him, as the Medicean rule 
was plain usurpation, so the Medicean appropriation 
of funds was plain theft. We may well imagine 
how the feeble pulse quickened as Lorenzo contem- 
plated the bankruptcy of his family as a condition 
of his salvation. But if so heavy a price could insure 

57 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



his soul's peace, and possibly the immunity of his 
house from further attack by this implacable foe, it 
might be worth the sacrifice. Long was the pause 
and very different the assent of this sorely troubled 
spirit, but at last the assent was given. ** Third," 
said the terrible monk, "you must give back to 
Florence her liberties." This time there was no 
struggle, no hesitation. Lorenzo turned his face 
to the wall and died unshriven. 

The story is told with hushed voice and the 
mingled awe and sympathy of the crowd is rarely 
broken by the note of exultation. Yet it is impos- 
sible to overlook the fact that the monk has scored 
another victory. He has refused to shrive the 
greatest and most powerful of Florentines, and 
Lorenzo has died unshriven. Vaguely the crowd 
see in the encounter the triumph of imcompromising 
righteousness over stricken and despairing sin. 

But there are those who woiild fain see in this 
final silence another meaning. The dying lips never 
gave up their secret, but if they could have spoken, 
might they not have said something like this: "I 
accept the shadowy faith you offer, as a man may do 
who has spent his life in a struggle with realities 
and in the impartial contemplation of speculative 
thought. I even sacrifice fortune and family as 
atonement for wrongs more nominal than real. I 
make no mention of services that might seem to 
justify my emoluments. I see no plain case of 
theft, as you do, monk ; but the title is not clear and 

58 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



conscience shall have the benefit of the doubt, even 
though ruin be the result. Myself I sacrifice and 
those that I may call my own. 

*' But give back to Florence her liberties ! Do you 
know what that means, O monk ? Are you unmindful 
of the passions that ran riot in the streets, of the 
war of factions, the chronic feuds, the choas in in- 
dustry, in government, in religion, in private life? 
Was it for naught that the strong arm took the helm 
when the ship was sore bested? The liberty of 
Florentines ; .what is it but the privilege of anarchy, 
chaos and murder? It is easy for you, wrought upon 
by fastings and visions in the night, to exhort to 
righteousness and reform. But think you that in a 
lifetime in which I have wrought to fashion a state 
from crude humanity as I foimd it, I have had no 
conscience, no thought for other's weal? You would 
make Florence into a heaven ; I have saved Florence 
from being a hell. Take the price of my doing, just 
or unjust, but not the thing I have done. Shrive 
me not, O monk, if you will not. I appeal unto 
God." 



The practical and the ideal; between these two 
there is no reconciliation, save in the finished work 
which their common effort has wrought. In this 
world of ours, there is instant need that something 
should be done with crude men and imperfect con- 
ditions. Somebody must take men as they are, 
appeal to them with argtiments that they can imder- 

59 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



stand, organize them for purposes that they can 
grasp, and appreciate. Selfish and coarse, they must 
be gratified, indulged, wheedled and cajoled. En- 
vious, petty, and dull, they must be managed by 
hidden forces and hoodwinked into well doing. End- 
less compromise, patch work, and inconsistency 
enter into every working plan. There is much that 
defies the simple rules of right, much that will not 
bear the light, much that grates upon our sensi- 
bihties, in the workings of every party, every busi- 
ness, every church. There are no ideal organiza- 
tions because there are no ideal people to organize. 
He who would be a doer of real things with real men 
must be a practical man ; he must take men as they 
are. 

But while we must take men as they are it must 
be with the unfailing purpose of making them what 
they ought to be. Take them as they are, or you 
will not take them at all. Make them what they 
ought to be or they are not worth the taking. This 
is the never-ceasing reminder of the idealist, to 
keep in sight the final goal. 

Yet it is the fatality of human nature to separate 
and antagonize these two fimctions, either of which 
is worthless without the other. The practical man 
who takes men as they are, adjusting himself to 
their foibles and manipulating them for his ends, 
becomes very well content with them as they are. 
Broad plans for human regeneration disturb his 
working program and put him out of his reckonings. 

60 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



Insensibly but inevitably he becomes an obstacle 
to reform and progress. The idealist just as in- 
evitably falls into the opposite error. Mistaking the 
ultimate ideal for a working program, he demands 
the impossible and sacrifices the feasible in an effort 
for the ideal. In the social order he demands 
absolute democracy, in business, conscious altruism 
and avowed stewardship, in politics only philan- 
thropic organization and public-spirited, self-denying 
service. All this is good, but it is not a working 
program. If by impassioned eloquence majorities 
are won for these ideals, they melt before the re- 
surging tide of himian passion as the morning dew 
disappears before the sun. There is an infinite 
pathos in that solemn vote by which the Florentine 
people, under the leadership of the great idealist, 
at a regular municipal election, chose Jesus Chirst 
for their king. Might not the most devout adherent 
of the older order have smiled at the simplicity of 
these children of the ideal ? 

And so the great struggle continues between the 
men of the moment and the men of the ideal. Mis- 
understood, dreaded, and hated of each other, they 
are none the less, useful only in cooperation. Neither 
can shrive the other's soul. Each must appeal 
unto God. 



61 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



VII 

Since the death of Lorenzo, all eyes are turned 
upon Savonarola. There have been happenings, to 
be sure, in the great palace of the Medici, which at 
other times would have challenged attention. There 
has been the same delegation of responsible citizens, 
the same grave petition to the youthful heir, and 
the same well-phrased acceptance. There have been 
grave decisions, too, and grave mistakes, alas, which, 
added to the monk's denunciations, have exasperated 
the people and sent the rash Piero into exile. But 
of those who hurry past the deserted palace to 
plain San Marco, two blocks away, or later to the 
great cathedral, where the monk's wonderful voice 
swells and sobs through the hollow aisles, there are 
few who remember and less who regret the family 
whom they so recently delighted to honor. The 
monk is regarded with the most varied sentiments, 
but all imite in giving him the homage of engrossing 
attention. Almost inevitably, too, attention begets 
sympathy, devotion, adoration in degree suited to 
temperament. As these few brief years have con- 
firmed his power, there are few who have resisted 
his spell. The opposition may say as of old : Behold 
how ye prevail nothing. Lo, the world is gone after 
him. 

62 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



Inquiry discloses nothing very startling in his 
earlier career. His parentage embodied the in- 
herent contradictions of the Renaissance, the essence 
of that conflict in which he is playing so conspicuous 
a part. His father is remembered as a polished man 
of the world, one in whom religious conformity 
was perfunctory, an attitude of urbanity and good 
breeding toward honored convention, for the skep- 
ticism of the Renaissance is seldom militant. Con- 
formity became easier as the church grew more 
complacent and less inclined to press its more irk- 
some claims. A true htimanist, all views and all 
principles had for him an academic interest, and 
none of them the force of conviction. To his tolerant 
and catholic spirit the harsh antithesis between duty 
and pleasure was one of the interesting austerities 
of an earlier ascetic age. Yet humanism does not 
deal wholly in negatives, and he found in the cult 
of beauty, taste, and learning, and in the refined 
pursuit of pleasure things worth living for. .'.• ' 'J 

To the mother this was the great void. In refine- 
ment and sensitiveness she was more than her 
husband's equal, but there seems to have been no 
place in her nature for the easy going indifference 
which was the keynote of his character. Devotion 
was with her a passion. Whatever her intellectual 
abilities, she seems to have felt no inclination to use 
them to dissect that which she loved. The imperious 
need of a God to worship and of a ritual language for 
the expressions of the emotions of her heart de- 

63 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



stroyed all impulse to make these the subject of 
analysis and inquiry. Above all she recoiled before 
lust and unhallowed pleasure in every form, and no 
decorum or disguise of decency reconciled her to 
its inherent ugliness. 

What may have been the relations between these 
two life partners and what the relation of each to 
the son we can only imagine. Such contrasts are 
common in these closest relations, and they by no 
means preclude tender affection and permanent de- 
votion. If the husband was true to the spirit of 
that culture which he accepted, he was tolerant of 
his wife's peculiarities and did not needlessly wound 
her by his conduct or his views. The wife had a 
much older warrant for fidelity and devotion. That 
each loved the son and sought in him the fulfill- 
ment of their hopes may be taken for granted. It 
is a matter of interesting appeal to the imagination 
what must have been the sentiments of this father 
when the son that he had destined for his own career 
of the law and his own place in the brilliant life of 
the day, suddenly and without his knowledge or 
consent took the vows of a monk. If death had 
blasted his hopes, he would have had our sympathy. 
How much more when the son not only failed him 
but repudiated and discredited his lifelong ideals. 
Even the mother may have questioned the wisdom 
of a step which, though much in the line of her 
sympathies, was at variance with her family loyalty. 

The early years of Savonarola's life have been 

64 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



stich as are called uneventful by observers who are 
unmindful of spiritual happenings. They have been 
years of preparation, yet preparation for an unknown 
future and one which he has hardly foreseen. They 
have been years of self -discipline, of ascetic devotion, 
and of apocalyptic exercise of a highly excitable 
imagination. He has joined a preaching order, but 
one whose original purpose has long been in abeyance, 
and he seems at first to have had no idea of his 
powers. These, indeed, were not manifest in his 
early efforts. His extreme sensitiveness is even yet 
an obstacle which he overcomes only by the most 
intense self-assertion. 

But Savonarola has other abilities than those of 
the orator and abilities that were earlier manifest. 
He is a bom leader of men, gifted with rare penetra- 
tion into character and motive and with the power 
to inspire equally love and fear. He possesses the 
rare faculty of speaking in the imperative mode 
without shouting, and the gift, almost equally rare, 
of absolute decision. It is a testimony to the large 
appreciation of ability always shown by the mar- 
velous Roman Catholic organization, that in this 
humanist age when the ideals of Savonarola com- 
mand so little S3mipathy, he should have been 
advanced so rapidly to positions of leadership and 
power. 

The death of Lorenzo, followed so soon by the 
collapse of his feeble successor, has left Savonarola 
the master of Florence. The position is one whicli 

65 



FA FLORENTINE REVERY 



he seems not to have sought and which it is doubtftil 
if he even yet reaHzes. He has from the first 
espoused the cause of popular government and in- 
sisted upon the restoration of its machinery which, 
under the Medici, had quietly ceased to fimction. 
He seems to believe absolutely in the right and the 
ability of the people to determine their own govern- 
ment, but he noticeably attaches the greatest im- 
portance to their spiritual guidance in the perform- 
ance of these functions, a fact which leads some to 
assert that his faith in the people is only a disguised 
faith in himself. Perhaps this faith is common to 
men who have large power of swaying others, and 
common, too, an element of tmconsciousness and 
self-deception. 

Savonarola, therefore, has bent all energies to the 
restoration of the popular government and the 
elaboration of its machinery. A great council now 
deliberates on legislative measures — not a little 
assisted by pronouncements from the pulpit of the 
Duomo — and a smaller body is charged with the 
duties of administration. 

It is but fair to say that this government seems 
to be giving a good account of itself. We can hardly 
wonder that those experienced in government affairs 
should have contemplated with anxiety, almost with 
dismay, this accession to power of a people now for 
nearly a century without experience. Nor was the 
denimciatory preaching of the monk whose ascend- 
ency was now inevitable, calculated to reassure them. 

66 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



There was ground to fear a rule of fanatics, and a 
policy of violence and reprisal. These men, how- 
ever, if not wholly reassured, confess that their 
worst fears have not been realized. The personnel 
of the government, while sympathetic toward the 
monk and favoring his program of reform, is for the 
most part sane, and the soberer elements are in the 
ascendant. There are those who are sanguine enough 
to suggest that Piero Soderini, if he can hold things 
steady tmtil extravagance has spent its force, perhaps 
until the monk has disappeared, may give to 
Florence an admirable government. '' '^l 

But even the monk has shown remarkable re- 
straint in connections where trouble was expected. 
He has stood like a rock against all vindictive pro- 
posals on the part of the malcontents who have been 
attracted by his unsparing denunciations, and now 
the Mediceans themselves look to him for protection. 
To the Medicean, accustomed to compromise and 
payment for services rendered, nothing is so re- 
markable about Savonarola as his stem opposition 
to the rapacity and vindictiveness of those who have 
helped raise him to power. j 

But if Savonarola shows mercy toward his fallen 
adversaries, he shows none toward the vices that 
they tolerated or the ideals they entertained. The 
aim of life is not beauty or pleasure, but righteousness 
and harmony with the divine will. Compared with 
these great ends, how trivial is the round of ephemeral 
pleasures on which our starveling humanity subsists. 

67 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



Savonarola does not forget that this establish- 
ment of the reign of righteousness must begin with 
the regeneration of the individual. For this purpose 
he uses those spiritual forces which in all ages have 
been recognized as legitimate in the service of re- 
ligion, fervent exhortation with appeals to divine 
compassion and divine retribution, the whole en- 
forced by the example of devotion and a blameless 
life. No man has ever sinpassed Savonarola in the 
power of this appeal. There are those who criticize 
his appeal to the lower motives and still more who 
judge him extreme in his condemnation of vanities 
and innocent pleasures. There are even those who 
see a fault in his immeasured appeal to the higher 
impulses. Inspired by his example and carried away 
by his hypnotic power, men are led on to heights 
of self-renunciation and to an tdtra purification of 
life which neither their own powers nor even his 
continued influence will enable them to maintain. 
The Medicean temperament instinctively feels that 
the reformer who overstrains human nature, like the 
builder who overstrains his beams and girders, will 
see his work go down in collapse. 

But for the moment, Florentine nature, reinforced 
by his wonderful example and his ever repeated 
appeal, still stands the strain. It is wonderfiil to 
what an extent private life has been transformed. 
Not only the unsightly vices but even the frivolities 
and vanities of life have been put away. Mis- 
chievous instincts that can not be wholly repressed 

68 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



are even harnessed to the work of regeneration, as 
witness these boys who, not long since, went about 
in white robes and with well conned phrases of the 
new order, claimed the false hair, the ribbons, and 
the rouge pots for the great bonfire in the piazza. 
What a chance for a boy ! 

But we must not judge this work of personal 
regeneration by picturesque incidents like this. It 
is agreed on all hands that the change is far-reaching 
and profound. Savonarola and his following are 
charged, not with levity or even with hypocrisy, 
but with excess of zeal. Nor is his following one 
of weaklings and women. It includes level heads 
like Soderini, and despite his hostility to art, not 
only serious spirits like Era Bartolommeo, but 
Sandro Botticelli, and the taciturn Michelangelo 
are among his devoted adherents. 

But Savonarola is nowise minded to stop with his 
work of personal regeneration. He is sagacious 
enough to perceive that men are very much the 
creatures of that social organization which they have 
themselves created. Individual reforms count for 
little until they are intrenched in a reformed society. 
For the children of God, there must be a kingdom 
of God. 

From the first, therefore, Savonarola has laimched 
his attack against iniquities in state and church. His 
prepossession in favor of popular government insured 
his uncompromising opposition to the Medicean 
regime, even had their administration been fault- 

69 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



less, for to his mind that regime was iniquitous in 
principle. It is interesting to speculate as to what 
would have been the result if this collision had 
occurred when the Medicean power was at its height 
under Cosimo or in Lorenzo's prime. But fate has 
willed that that power should collapse at the moment 
of Savonarola's attack, thus leaving the ground clear 
for the great experiment. 

Success seems to have crowned the undertaking. 
The popular government has been established and 
able and earnest men have been found for its service. 
The drastic reform of private life has been followed 
by a like reform of the state. If this reform seems 
extreme as judged by prevailing standards, it fairly 
represents the new standards of Florentine private 
life and the will of the people. Given the new ideals 
which unquestionably dominate Florence, it is diffi- 
cult to criticise the measures adopted or the means 
chosen for their enforcement. 

But there are ominous signs that the movement 
has reached its limits and that a tragic change is 
impending. The initial impulse seems to have spent 
its force and the opposition is becoming more re- 
doubtable. 

There is the Medicean party. The family is gone, 
but their party, the party of big business and of 
practical politics, is here and irreconcilable. Not 
that all are seekers after place and privilege. There 
are many high minded and disinterested men among 
them, men who sympathize with the soberer part 

70 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



of Savonarola's program and are grateful for the 
protection which his powerful influence has ac- 
corded them. But these men see in Savonarola the 
only safeguard against the excesses and the vagaries 
of popular government, and this safeguard, in the 
nature of the case, can not be permanent. Without 
him what would the mob have done on the morrow 
of Piero's departure? What will the mob do on the 
morrow of Savonarola's disappearance? Savonarola 
will have no successor, and the mood of spiritual 
exaltation which his magic has created will not 
be self -perpetuating. Patriotism quite as much as 
selfishness prompts them to seize the reins and fore- 
stall a perilous interregnum. 

More redoubtable is the hostility of the church. It 
is true that the church has always done lip service 
to Savonarola's ideals. It is from the church, indeed, 
that Savonarola's entire program is taken. Even 
his methods are such as have long enjoyed its sanc- 
tion. Monk and prelate have no such reason for 
opposition as have the Medici, men of seciilar aims 
and worldly methods. But monk and prelate have 
found reasons, nevertheless, and their opposition is 
instinctive and uncompromising. There are the 
Franciscans, for instance, in their great stronghold 
of Santa Croce. Who that knows them can expect 
them to regard complacently this immense increase 
of Dominican influence? And who would hope that 
an archbishop, one appointed by the pope who tried 
to assassinate Lorenzo, would submit tamely to the 

71 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



absolute domination of his diocese by a belligerent 
monk? We need not lay too much stress upon the 
certainly low standards of church morality at this 
time to understand that conflict with reforming zeal 
is inevitable. Here too the opposition is not entirely 
selfish or base. Fear of the zealot is instinctive in 
all established organizations. The zealot is after all 
a distirrber of the peace, and he takes a large contract 
when he engages that the good accomplished shall 
outweigh the harm. 

Church and monastery are outside the pale of 
Savonarola's reforming legislation. They are not 
answerable to the local authorities, but only to Rome. 
Against their passive resistance persuasion and legis- 
lation are alike impotent. Nothing datmted, the 
intrepid monk launches his denimciations against 
monk and prelate, against even the pope himself. 
Ever seeking practical means to accompHsh prac- 
tical ends, he has written to the princes of Italy 
urging them to call a church coimcil and depose a 
pope who bought his election. 

It is all very logical, but all very desperate. The 
sanest of Savonarola's supporters can not help asking 
what is to be expected from a pope xmder such 
circumstances, especially from such a pope as Alex- 
ander Borgia. And what is to be hoped from the 
princes of Italy, men schooled in the prevailing polit- 
ical ethics and well informed as to the conditions 
which would govern a new papal election? If the 
Frate could preach to them, perhaps; but can he 

72 



A ELORENTINE REVERY 



arouse their consciousness by a diplomatic note? 
These thoughts are not reassuring, and those who 
know pope Borgia do not expect him to be restrained 
by prudence or scruple. Savonarola is treading the 
way to the scaffold. 

But there is a greater danger and a deeper tragedy. 
Savonarola himself has changed. Outwardly he is 
the same. There is the same blameless private life, 
the same devotion to the cause of humanity, and 
the same intrepidity of spirit. But in the heroic 
struggle of these six years, Savonarola has found 
himself in the grip of practical realities. That im- 
swerving loyalty to principle which he had demanded 
so imcompromisingly in those early Medicean days 
has proved impracticable even imder his all-powerful 
guidance. Hampered by a multitude of private 
interests, prejudices, and antipathies which no ptilpit 
appeal could dispel, he has learned to wink at much 
which he once condemned and to choose the lesser 
evil. Threatened by faction and imperiled by 
opposition, his government has had to maintain a 
majority by complaisance and conciliation. A dis- 
creet silence has become necessary under circum- 
stances where once the prophet would have spoken. 
Worse still, emergencies have arisen in which laws 
he had demanded for the protection of the individual 
against arbitrary power have had to be set aside. 
It simply had to be. Either the law must go for the 
moment, or the Medici would return and the law 
would go altogether. What friend of the Republic 

73 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



cotdd hesitate before such an alternative? Yet what 
would he have said — nay, what did he say — six years 
ago, when the Medici did this very thing? Savon- 
arola is far too keen and far too candid not to be 
conscious of this inconsistency. Yet he is too prac- 
tical to throw away so much of substantial achieve- 
ment for reasons which even his most sympathetic 
advisers must regard as inadequate. No, he will 
prefer the lesser to the greater sacrifice. Insensibly 
but remorselessly the exigencies of practical affairs 
have brought the prophet to his knees and he has 
bowed to the god of the Medici, compromise. 

In vain he strives to avoid, to disguise, to forget 
the tragic surrender. He urges that he is but a 
private citizen and that it is for the official guardians 
of the state to decide, but he recalls that he has 
habitually influenced and can still influence their 
decision. Yes, but the reasons of expediency on 
which their decision is based are compelling. Alas, 
how often he has denoimced this Medicean phil- 
osophy, and declared that governments based upon 
expediency were an abomination imto the Lord! 
But is the comparison fair? Is emergency action to 
be compared with habitual action? Is it not one 
thing to set aside the law in the interest of righteous- 
ness, and quite another to set it aside in behalf of 
private or party advantage? Sophistries, all; he 
half realizes it ; but sophistries that do him honor. 

But regardless of reasoning and anguish of spirit 
there stands necessity, pitiless, inexorable. These 

74 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



concessions must be made; Florence must be saved; 
the kingdom of righteousness must prevail. 

Alas that redemption must be purchased at so 
heavy a price! Is it not enough that the redeemer 
should be crucified in the flesh? Must he also be 
tortured in conscience and crucified in the spirit? 
Has any man known real martyrdom until God has 
forsaken him ? 

These experiences have had their inevitable in- 
fluence upon Savonarola's preaching. The heedless 
listener may hear the same wondrous voice, the same 
lofty appeal to purity and self-abnegation. But to 
those more subtly attuned there is a loss of the old 
assurance. If the eternal verities are asserted with 
the same old confidence, their local application is 
less frequent and positive. There are things ques- 
tionable to the simple minded concerning which he 
is silent, even apologetic. 

There is darkness over the land in these hours of 
the great tragedy. It is no peril of foreign invasion 
or burden of private trouble that turns all eyes 
toward the oracle. The faithful have loved long and 
deeply, and their solicitude in this dark hour is for 
the object of their devotion. The sole demand of 
love is the rehabilitation of the prophet. Surely he 
understands, and he will not leave them in darkness. 
Oh for one more message, one more clear utterance 
with the old-time assurance of one who has stood in 
the presence of the Eternal. 

The message has come, the saddest ever wrung 

73 



A FLORENTINE REVERY 



from a soiil whose supreme effort had been to win 
a world to God and to righteousness. "Brethren, 
pray for me, for God hath removed from me the 
spirit of phophecy." 

To those who sit among the stars and view from 
afar the turmoil of life, the movement reveals itself 
in broad and simple lines. The vast complex re- 
solves itself into a few primal forces governed by 
clearly discernible principles. How easy from this 
vantage point to chart the course of life! How 
inspiring the confidence bom of this privileged 
vision I 

Within the turmoil this simplicity disappears. 
The primal forces, deflected by all manner of obsta- 
cles, compHcated and overborne by cotmter forces 
are but intermittently discernible, often seemingly 
in abeyance. In this perplexing struggle with the 
local and the temporary, how inadequate, how posi- 
tively misleading, even, is this prophet's chart of 
the eternal verities! When every hour some tm- 
charted reef may bring disaster, what use to relax 
our vigilance in contemplating its unpractical gener- 
alities! The vision fades and a narrow-horizoned 
opportimism becomes the rule of hfe. Yet to those 
who have once sat at the foot of God's throne and 
beheld the course of man's destiny stretch plain and 
straight toward its shining goal, there is no sacrifice 
like the loss of that vision. 

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